At Swift, we’re constantly taking a cultural pulse in a number of different ways, including looking at pictures of cool stuff on the Internet. Much of the best content is created by teenagers. Scrolling through photos of kids with purple hair doing skateboard tricks, it’s hard not to get a wistful pang as we recall our own salad days. We remember when we were those kids, when we had that kind of playful energy and were that deeply into ourselves, our world and our version of cool.

Rick, one of our creative directors, says these kids are amazing. I agree, but at the risk of sounding like a deluded old person, I contend that they’re not any cooler than kids of any other era, they just have the Internet to document it. We all had our own creative pursuits—the student paper, Xerox ‘zines, sketchbooks exploding with drawings—but these didn’t garner the instant validation and broad audience that social networks do. Nobody else really knew what we were doing with our free time. My kneejerk reaction:  “Wow, I wish we had social networks back when I was 13. It would have been so much easier to find other likeminded kids, to put something out in the world and get a response.”

But there’s another side to it. Read More »